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What’s left? The small and home businesses! Meraki released a new line of access points aimed for the small shops called Meraki Go.

By the tap of an app on a mobile phone, a wireless network can be live within minutes. Taking some features from their enterprise dashboard, a business owner can set some basic application thresholds, security, and other settings.

Using the strength of the brand name and simple dashboard, Meraki is enticing users with competitive pricing on the Go access points.

This is targeted to really small businesses, no more than 10 people or 20 devices. The critical piece will be the simplicity of the app in configuring the network.

The problem will be in troubleshooting. I don’t see how a small IT shop can help manage the wireless network unless they’re sharing credentials with the owner or taking over the installation completely.

But is this a path Meraki should be taking? Creating another product line? Meraki should be focusing on making the current offering better, developing more APIs, improving the hardware, AP antenna offerings, I can go on.

I’ll say I’m not sure about this direction. It will pull resources away from their enterprise products. But knowing Meraki and Cisco, there’s a large customer base worth taking.

Meraki Health

Cisco Meraki is rolling out the new Meraki Health dashboard to customers. The goal is to allow IT staff to quickly identify root causes to various Wi-Fi issues. It’s the common trend amongst cloud-managed Wi-Fi vendors.

Troubleshooting Wi-Fi connectivity is a difficult skill to master by an individual. Without the in-house expertise, IT is often left relying on dashboards to tell them what’s wrong.

Heuristic Approach

Meraki Health is taking a heuristic approach to troubleshooting. The dashboard uses a technique to help in problem-solving by learning and discovering what’s happening on the Wi-Fi network. Then those root causes are presented on-screen.

This new visual method of troubleshooting allows a quick look into what types of issues clients are experiencing. It can be narrowed down to specific access points and into types of applications.

The Client Journey

We’re provided insight into the client journey on a Wi-Fi network. Meraki Health takes a look at 5 different steps of the client journey:

Association

Authentication

DHCP

DNS

Latency

At each step there’s a visualization into the percentage of successful or failed connections. Breaking out each step provides a simple approach to troubleshooting and getting down to the real cause of the issue.

An example could be at the authentication step with a user incorrectly typing in the password for the SSID.

Latency visibility offers insight into how applications are performing over Wi-Fi. Latency is broken down into traffic types, drawing similarities to QoS traffic types. The visualization indicates the percentage of latency traffic encountering poor performance.

The scope can then be narrowed down to specific applications such as YouTube, Skype, or other applications.

Spotting the anomalies

Rowell’s Take

It’s a great addition to the Meraki solution. By giving the power to network operators, they are more capable of solving some of the most common Wi-Fi issues. The biggest advantage with Meraki Health is the ability to solve these issues quickly.

What I find interesting is Meraki Health takes a heuristic approach rather than stepping into artificial intelligence and machine learning to take troubleshooting to the next level.

Meraki can leverage their cloud infrastructure to build a solution which can help solve issues automatically by learning client traffic patterns and flows to help the network tune itself. For example, seeing where an area is about to become highly dense with devices and capacity is to increase.

The dashboard can help network operators become more proactive over these situations by bringing it to attention before the event impacts clients.

François’ Take

Meraki is often used by customers having a small IT team without extensive Wi-Fi expertise. So this new feature is a great tool which will help them to troubleshooting day-to-day Wi-Fi issues. I won’t be surprised if this feature keeps getting better over time so it can be used and understood by most IT professionals.

I believe it is very interesting to see network companies spending more and more time on developing software which will help the customer provide a better over solution. It is just the beginning. I am expecting to see more and more vendors coming out with software solutions in order to complement their hardware offers and help the users better take advantage of the hardware. It is also a way for them to create a competitive advantage over the competition.

User experience is very important for me on every project I work on and that’s why I like this new Health feature as it helps us to provide a better user experience overall.

#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by technologists for technologists. In this episode, Cisco Champions Rowell Dionicio and Robert Boardman discuss Cisco WiFi Troubleshooting and Optimization with Jerome Henry.

Jerome Henry is a Principal Engineer, Technical Marketing in the Wi-Fi Business Unit. He has extensive experience in troubleshooting wireless networks. In this Cisco Champion Radio episode, we talk Jerome about tools for troubleshooting wifi, packet analysis and MIMO considerations, using Excel to troubleshoot (yes Excel!), access points coverage, most common issues, and Jerome’s process for optimizing a wireless network.

Rowell and Robert host a video channel together called Wi-Fi of Everything. Be sure to check it out and subscribe!

You can catch this episode on Sound Cloud and listen to the other Cisco Champion Radio episodes as well.